I stopped scrolling last night when I saw this headline a proposal to freeze Satoshis 1.1 million BTC
In Bitcoin? The network literally built on the idea that no one can touch your coins?
So I dug in. A developer named Jameson Lopp along with five others has put forward a proposal called BIP 361. And the reasoning isnt dramatic its mathematical. Quantum computers if they ever get powerful enough could use something called Shors algorithm to work backward from a public key and derive the private key. Here s the real problem: roughly 34% of Bitcoin's current supply sits in old style addresses where the public key is already exposed on chain. Thats basically sitting there ready to be stolen if quantum ever catches up.
The proposal moves in three phases. After three years those old addresses stop receiving new funds. After five years, old signatures get invalidated completely, meaning any coins still sitting there are frozen for good. A third phase talks about a possible recovery path using
zero knowledge proofs but that's still just an idea on paper not a working solution.
And this is where the real debate kicks in. On one side, there's a genuine security case. If a quantum attack ever becomes real we're talking about 6 to 7 million BTC that could be drained and that wouldnt just hurt the address owners it would shake the entire market On the other side there's the principle Bitcoin was built on: not your keys, not your coins. If the network can decide when your money quietly expires, how does that square with censorship resistance?
Even Lopp has said this isn't ready for adoption right now just a possible model on the table. But the question isn't going anywhere.
So tell me if you had old BTC sitting in a wallet you forgot about, or a seed phrase you lost, would you want the network to freeze it to keep it safe? Or should that choice always stay yours, no matter the outcome?
#BIP361 #BitcoinDominanceRisesTo59%
In Bitcoin? The network literally built on the idea that no one can touch your coins?
So I dug in. A developer named Jameson Lopp along with five others has put forward a proposal called BIP 361. And the reasoning isnt dramatic its mathematical. Quantum computers if they ever get powerful enough could use something called Shors algorithm to work backward from a public key and derive the private key. Here s the real problem: roughly 34% of Bitcoin's current supply sits in old style addresses where the public key is already exposed on chain. Thats basically sitting there ready to be stolen if quantum ever catches up.
The proposal moves in three phases. After three years those old addresses stop receiving new funds. After five years, old signatures get invalidated completely, meaning any coins still sitting there are frozen for good. A third phase talks about a possible recovery path using
zero knowledge proofs but that's still just an idea on paper not a working solution.
And this is where the real debate kicks in. On one side, there's a genuine security case. If a quantum attack ever becomes real we're talking about 6 to 7 million BTC that could be drained and that wouldnt just hurt the address owners it would shake the entire market On the other side there's the principle Bitcoin was built on: not your keys, not your coins. If the network can decide when your money quietly expires, how does that square with censorship resistance?
Even Lopp has said this isn't ready for adoption right now just a possible model on the table. But the question isn't going anywhere.
So tell me if you had old BTC sitting in a wallet you forgot about, or a seed phrase you lost, would you want the network to freeze it to keep it safe? Or should that choice always stay yours, no matter the outcome?
#BIP361 #BitcoinDominanceRisesTo59%